


Forget About the Flowers

by Artemis_Day



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon, F/M, Gen, Maybe - Freeform, Missing scene-ish, This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Thor: The Dark World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 01:55:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3100736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis_Day/pseuds/Artemis_Day
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Was he different?" Jane asks as they wait out the battle in the dungeons. Frigga smiles. "Let me show you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget About the Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> This was a collaboration between me and startraveller776, and features art by the wonderful decemberbellz.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

She’s a petite thing, Frigga thinks as she looks over her eldest’s beloved. As fragile as others of her kind, and yet, as they hurry away from the skirmish, there’s a filament of uruin the straightening of the girl’s back, in the set of her jaw. Jane Foster is mortal, but she is not weak.

Frigga is impressed.

They’ve absconded to the queen’s personal sanctuary. Jane fidgets, paces about the vast, pillared room as Frigga explains their plans should anything go awry. She worries the girl is too anxious to have heard the necessary details—her amber eyes often dart to the open balcony, toward the unseen conflict beyond—but when questioned, Jane answers with a near perfect recounting of Frigga’s admonitions. Brave and intelligent.

Impressive, indeed.

Now there is nothing for them but to wait—and hope. Hope that Odin and Thor are able to quell the riot quickly. Hope that Loki is not in the center of it, or more especially thecause of it. Frigga’s heart anneals as she thinks of her wayward second son. She’s defied her husband’s orders to stay away from Loki because, unlike the All-Father, she still sees a vestige of the boy she raised in the bitter, enraged man who prowls the confines of his dungeon cell like a snarling beast. Loki is not lost to her; she refuses to believe he is. She will reach him, bring him back from this delirium—in time.

Time. Another thing to hope for as the battle wages on beneath the palace. May the Norns give her enough time to save her son.

Jane has stopped pacing, and the lack of movement draws Frigga’s gaze to her. The girl stands before the line of images Frigga enchanted years ago to immortalize happier days. When the realms were united, at peace. When her family was whole. There’s Odin, younger, resplendent in gleaming armor, Gungnir in his hand as Sleipnir rears on hind legs. There is Thor and Loki as boys, laughing as they wield their practice swords—along with dozens of other memories. Each one is a treasure worth more than the coveted jewels from the mines of Nidavellir.

“This is amazing,” Jane says with hushed awe. She brushes her fingertips through one, and the image dissolves in wispy swirls before restoring itself. “How did you… Where are the projectors?” She tips her head up to search the vaulted ceiling and then down to scrutinize the base of the display table.

Frigga raises a brow. “Projectors?”

“Yeah.” Jane nods distractedly as she crouches to look beneath the tabletop. “These are holographic projections, right? So you have some kind of machine—a device to create them.”

Frigga smiles, amused by the girl’s inquisitive nature. She understands why Thor is taken with her. Loki would have liked her as well, if he— “They are illusions,” she explains to drown out the dark thought. “Magic.” She demonstrates by conjuring another one. She intended to create a perfect likeness of Jane, but instead Loki flares to life before them.

Jane steps back with a gasp, though the illusion bears only passing resemblance to the man he’s become. His shrewd eyes glitter with playfulness rather than calculation. His grin is open, unfettered with malice. There is reckless youth in his face rather than the fine lines of resentment, hatred. This is the Loki Frigga remembers—the Loki she yearns to see again.

Jane, however, has only known the crazed demon god who left death and destruction in the wake of his sojourn through her realm. It was the tantrum of a broken little boy, but Frigga doesn’t expect Jane to understand this unfortunate truth, and so she lets the illusion dissipate.

“Magic,” Jane murmurs as if the concept is beyond her understanding. She turns back to the memories and appears to study the captured moments rather than the force preserving them. Her gaze seems to linger on those which feature the raven-haired prince, and Frigga hopes the girl sees, at least in part, the broader spectrum hidden inside of Loki—that there was lightness before the dark.

Jane is fixated on the image of Loki as a young boy, grin eager as he holds out a bouquet of crimson flowers. “Was he—”

“Different?” Frigga finishes for her. She smiles as she recalls that afternoon. “Yes, he was.”

Jane’s expression becomes thinly-veiled disbelief, and Frigga sighs, her chest aching with the idea that Loki’s few short years of violent madness has somehow undone a millennium of transparent joy and cleverness and harmless mischief.

“Let me show you.”

Frigga gingerly cups Jane’s cheeks in her hands, and when Jane gives her a diminutive nod of agreement, she allows the bittersweet memory to pour through her fingers.

******

She’s lost in a cloud of what appears to be smoke. It’s hard to tell when she can’t get her eyes open. She feels something thicker than air on her skin and inhales a scent of burning that miraculously does not send her into a coughing fit. Her arms and legs are together and refuse to budge, as if she’s been compressed inside of a narrow tube. If she’s moving, she can’t feel it. Her feet have left solid ground and her stomach is flip-flopping around inside of her, but there is no wind in her face or change in air pressure. She might in fact just be floating through a void, alone and endless. She could even have her eyes open after all, but simply can’t tell because there’s nothing to see.

Then Jane blinks her eyes, and she’s staring at a bunch of tall trees grouped together on the edge of a field. The sky is bright, though it lacks a sun. There are voices in the distance that don’t come from her head and speak words she has no hope of understanding, if they are words at all. The smoke or whatever it was has dissipated, and already she’s forgotten the feel of it. Was it ever there at all?

It must have been, because Jane knows she doesn’t know what plane of existence she’s ended up in. She’s pretty sure she was indoors a moment ago, but she’s not positive. When she tries to remember, she picks up on some hazy shadows that resemble a person, and warmth she can’t explain enshrouds her. Digging deeper yields nothing but a headache; it’s as if part of her has been locked away in a place she can’t reach. What she does know is purely basic information.

She knows her name is Jane Foster and she knows she is an astrophysicist. She knows she has an intern named Darcy and a mentor in Erik. She knows that she’s not on earth, wherever she is. That the latter isn’t causing her more duress does not astound her as much as it should, and before Jane can lose herself any more in questions and hidden memories that she is sure would provide the answers, the world around her clears, and those tinny voices that before now barely brushed past her consciousness now wash over her.

Five little kids play in the foreground of a magnificent palace. It’s a game Jane doesn’t know and first glance looks like simple rough-housing, but their movements are fluid and controlled, as if they are experienced warriors hiding behind the faces of mere children. One of them, with bright blonde hair like the missing sun and wide blue eyes full of laughter, strikes Jane deep in her core as someone she should know right away, and yet, she doesn’t. He pins a dark haired boy with Asian features to the ground, while a young girl rushes at him from the front. The other two are another blonde boy and a boy with black hair whose face is hidden from sight. They are locked in a stalemate, unable to get a hit on each other, until the blonde boy goes in low, and almost sinks his fist into his opponent’s side. He fails only when his arm sails through the other boy. He yelps and stumbles back. A second boy appears out of nowhere and delivers a leg to his shins, knocking him to the ground.

“I win!” says the black haired boy. His double fades and he stands in full view of Jane, who doesn’t think she’s ever seen anyone so striking in her life. Something about this boy draws all of her attention to him, like he’s the only one who matters and everything and everyone else around is just scenery.

“You didn’t win!” shouts the defeated blond boy. “You cheated. You know you can’t win in a fair fight, so you cheated.”

“Why don’t you go play with your stupid little tricks somewhere else?” The girl scowls at the boy and makes like she is going to punch him if he doesn’t do as she says. “We didn’t want to play with you anyway.”

The second blond boy, the one Jane saw first, looks like he’s about to step up and say something, but the black haired boy storms off before he can. Then he raises an arm, mouth open as if he’s going to call after him. He doesn’t. The black haired boy puts as much distance between himself and his friends as he can, muttering to himself all the while.

“They’re just jealous because they can’t do it,” he’s saying. “At least I know how to use my head instead of just my fists. I could beat them all if I wanted to.”

He stops, directly parallel with where Jane is standing, but he doesn’t look her way. He stares off at a great ocean that Jane can’t see an end to. His musings fall to whispers as he sinks to the ground and crosses his legs in the grass. He starts fingering blades of grass, his voice rising once again. This time, he speaks a language Jane can’t understand. His fingers run along one particular blade that twists and grows as they trail higher. The top of the blade splits off into sections that spread outward and become flat. Their colors shift from green to deep red.

“It’s beautiful,” Jane says as the weed turned flower fully forms before her eyes.

The boy pauses. He turns his head, and almost meets Jane’s eye, but only looks past her. Through her.

 _‘Can he not see me?’_  she wonders.

Jane is a scientist at heart. If she has a question with no answer readily available, she’ll just have to find it herself.

“You have an amazing gift,” she says, crouching to the boy’s level. “I mean it, you should be proud. Don’t listen to what any of them says. You’re probably right about them being jealous. I know I would be.”

He’s made two more flowers in the time since she’s been speaking. He seems to do it just for the sake of it, or for the sake of boredom and needing some way to relax himself. She hopes he’s not the type to destroy his creations after they’re finished, but something tells her she shouldn’t worry about that.

“You don’t need to be like them to be worthwhile.” Jane doesn’t know why she said that. It just came out of her mouth. “I hope you don’t feel like you have to.”

Tears prickle in her eyes that make no sense to her. She’s not sad, or overcome by emotion. She has no reason to cry. The tears that flow don’t even feel like they’re hers, as if she’s shedding them in place of someone else.

The boy never looks her way. He experiment has failed. He sees a regal woman in a queenly dress just a short distance away, sitting serenely at the edge of a lush garden. He snatches up the flowers, running to her as fast as his legs will carry him. His visage blurs and fades as he gets further away from her, and all the grass and the sunless sky go with him. The world is smoke and fog once more and Jane is falling… falling… falling into nothingness. Her eyes grow heavy once more.

******

Jane’s heart thrums as she hurries to keep up with Sif. It’s been a day since Malekith and his minions invaded Asgard, a day since Frigga gave her life to protect the Aether—to protect the human infected with it. Jane hardly knew the queen, but she knows Thor. And a man so kind and loyal is not created in a vacuum. After meeting Odin, there is no doubt in Jane’s mind that Frigga was the prevailing influence on her son.

Her sons. Plural. Jane knows Loki, too—experienced his very special brand of darkness when he sent the Destroyer to kill Thor, when he possessed Erik’s mind in order to build a gateway using the Tesseract, when he razed half of Manhattan in his desire to bring Earth to its knees.

He had the same mother.

But then, discrepancies like that exist among many families, Jane reasons. Some people are bad apples no matter how good their parents are. He chose to be a monster, and she chooses not to pity him.

Thor awaits them at the end of the corridor, but her eyes fall to his companion—his brother. What is he doing here?

She points at him in disbelief. “You’re—”

“I’m Loki,” he says as though this is a simple introduction. “You may have heard of—”

She punches him. There was no regret in his deep timbre, no apologies. (No gloating, either.) “That was for New York.” And everything else. Especially dishonoring the mother who raised him—though this thought seems out of place with her other grievances.

He grins at her, proclaims that he likes her, and for a breath, she sees a fractured boy instead of a maniacal immortal. She thinks of an endless sea and tiny red flowers and a woman waiting in the gardens. A memory almost, though how? She recalls the holographs—illusions—that Frigga briefly showed her, but nothing beyond that before Malekith and his horned demon breached the sanctuary.

There is no way Jane can know that Loki used his magic to create something beautiful for his mother—that he hadn’t merely plucked the bouquet. And the inexplicable ache in her chest over the loss of that boy, the hope that he will find his way back again—she doesn’t want it. He doesn’t deserve it. She hardens her glare, grasps at the well of hatred she bears for him. And yet, that foreign thread of sympathy knots itself in her emotions and refuses to budge.

She tells herself it’s because of Frigga’s unconditional love for him, because of Thor’s, that she feels a modicum of grief over what Loki has become—but it doesn’t ring entirely true.

******

“I like her,” he says, and it’s not a lie, though Loki knows everyone present will believe it is.

It’s just as well. This is not a truth he admits lightly, not even to himself. Standing before him is the tiny, inconsequential wisp of a mortal who has changed Thor for the ‘better’ and brought about the death of Frigga. She’s even smaller up close than he thought, so painfully fragile. How easily could he crush her very bones if he only had the power?

That he doesn’t goes beyond the binding of his manacles. The knuckles on the hand that connected with his cheek are red as she brushes some hair out of her eyes and meets his gaze with unbridled fierceness. She’d hit him again if she could, if she had the strength to hurt him like he’s hurt her people. She doesn’t, and they both know it. So her hatred reaches him without words or actions, and though he senses there is something else beneath that rage, he cannot pick out what it is. He’s better off not trying. He might just fall in deeper if he does. There is something about her that stays his hand and brings out a smile in him. He cannot remove it, only twist it into a smirk that masks the truth of it.

So he leaves her with that. He likes her. He likes her for reasons he cannot comprehend. He considers the flowers he used to make for Frigga when he was a boy. They were much like her: faceless among a crowd of a million others, but under the proper circumstances, something more could be coaxed from their depths, something that sets them apart.

It’s not the most apt comparison when he thinks about it. Jane Foster is still very much a weed, if one that stands taller than her fellows. He knows not where the idea of the flowers came from. He hasn’t thought about that since the very last time he ever made them.

It was a silly notion from the start, that he could feel anything more for Jane Foster than cool indifference. So he pushes it aside, deep into the recesses of his mind with everything else he once held dear; away with the flowers and the smiles that lit up Frigga’s face when she held them to her heart. It’s just a passing fancy.  
  


**~FIN~**


End file.
